Show HN: Get paid for crawling the web | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Get paid for crawling the web

github.com

5 pointsjdrock7 comments

This is the most stupid & perhaps unethical way of 'powering' your search engine in history.

Paying a developer to include a web crawler in their extension? Whilst using the users' bandwidth?

I hope 'Datafiniti' fades out pretty damn soon.

Why all the hate? So far it just looks like a monetization tool to embed in a Chrome extension. Nothing says it's going to run there by default. We have no info on the presence or absence of compulsory disclaimers. Nor do we have any info about the default quotas of daily processing per install.

If the extension provides value to the user, it might be a way to compensate the provider for the said value. The same way ads compensate the provider of apps. In either case, computing time and bandwidth are used.

Now, having said that, if it ran 24/7 and used GBs of bandwidth per day on a single node, I would definitely side with you. But if it was embedded in a way where you get extra value once you enable it, that's another question.

To be a little clearer, I'm only completely against this when it's enabled within an extension by default; therefore crawling the web without the end users' knowledge.

If it's something you can enable, then it isn't so bad. This should ultimately be a choice that the user makes.

We're experimenting with a new way to power our Datafiniti search engine. Essentially you get paid for running a distributed web crawler through any Chrome Extension.

Who gets paid? The Chrome Extension developer? But it is the user machine/network performing the work, right?

There is something in this I don't like. Can't quite put my finger on it.

Our intention is to pay the developer. Of course, there'd be nothing stopping the developer from paying out to users as well.

Happy to get more feedback!

"Nothing stopping the developer from paying out to users as well" - this is absolutely ridiculous; of course a developer with absolutely no payment infrastructure is going to start relaying these ill-gotten gains back to users. It just doesn't work like that.

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